


Easing The Spring

by GnomeIgnominious



Series: Scenes from a reconciliation [8]
Category: Cabin Pressure
Genre: Father-Daughter Relationship, Gen, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-06
Updated: 2021-03-06
Packaged: 2021-03-12 10:08:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,303
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29882985
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GnomeIgnominious/pseuds/GnomeIgnominious
Summary: A long, solo cargo flight gives Douglas some much-needed thinking time.
Series: Scenes from a reconciliation [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2197014
Comments: 3
Kudos: 5





	Easing The Spring

It had been two days since Douglas had had the phone call from Verity. The first time he’d heard her voice in thirteen years.

He hadn’t recognised it.

He usually ignored unfamiliar phone numbers. For some reason he’d been getting a lot of spam calls recently, and usually let it ring out and go to voicemail. He’d only answered the phone because he was waiting for a call back from British Gas about getting a new boiler installed. That sort of thing was harder to arrange now that Helena had moved out. No one at home to let the engineer in.

But it hadn’t been British Gas. He’d answered the phone, and instead of the bored tones of an underpaid call centre rep, a young woman’s voice came down the line.

“Um. Hi,” she’d said, as though she was surprised he’d answered. There was a long pause before she spoke again. “It’s Verity.”

“Verity?” He hadn’t managed to keep the shock out of his voice and had been glad that he was already sitting down. He had a strange swooping sensation in his stomach. “My Verity?”

“I… Millie got in touch and… well. I thought I should see how you are.”

“I’m fine,” he’d said. “Are you all right? I hear a bit about you from your mum now and then.”

“I’m good,” she’d said, and she’d talked a little about herself. It was a rather awkward conversation, because Douglas was desperate to ask her a hundred questions and could have happily listened to her for hours, but Verity obviously wanted to keep it short. In the end, they rang off with tentative plans to meet in person soon.

A long, solo cargo flight gave Douglas some much-needed thinking time.

“Hi Douglas! Here’s your tea.” Arthur clattered into the flight deck with his usual enthusiasm.

“Thank you, Arthur.”

They had been at cruising altitude for two hours already, and had another three to go. Douglas had been turning over the question in his mind of why Verity had got back in touch now, of all times? Douglas didn’t know how much Cath told Verity about his life, but he presumed Verity didn’t know that he’d split up with Helena. Perhaps she didn’t even know he’d been married again in the first place. It had a perverse sort of symmetry to it though, Verity re-entering his life just as Helena stepped out of it.

It was times like this that Douglas grudgingly missed Martin’s presence in the flight deck. Terrible at word games he might be, but he was always a willing, and distracting, participant.

Douglas glanced over his shoulder to see Arthur still standing there, gazing in rapt enjoyment out of the windscreen at the sky.

“You can stay up here for a while if you like, Arthur,” he said. “Since we’ve got no passengers today you might as well keep me company.”

“Brilliant! Thanks, Douglas!” Arthur plonked himself down in Martin’s seat.

They flew on in silence for a while, as Douglas racked his brains for a game simple enough for Arthur to understand. Coming up empty-handed, he returned to the other question weighing on his mind: Verity.

Try as he might, Douglas knew he couldn’t really answer why she'd decided to get back in touch. Probably Verity herself didn’t even know. One thing he could occupy himself with working out, though, was how she’d got his number. That conundrum must have a tangible solution.

Cath hadn’t given it to her, he’d already asked. He hadn’t asked Millie, but since Verity and Millie hadn’t met since Millie was a baby, hadn’t ever talked before this past week as far as Douglas knew, it seemed unlikely to have come from her.

That left one possibility. Someone from MJN.

“Arthur,” Douglas said, glancing sideways. “Have you given my phone number to anyone recently?”

Arthur’s face was its usual picture of innocence.

“No. Oh, unless you count the internet as a person. Actually, I suppose it’s quite a lot of people. Maybe all the people in the world! But I haven’t given it to anyone specific, no.”

“You put my phone number on the internet.” Now the recent deluge of spam calls made sense. “Why did you do that?”

“It was for the website! Skip asked me to put his on there because he thought he might get more van bookings.”

Douglas privately disagreed with that idea. The number of people who wanted to hire both a decrepit old aeroplane and a decrepit old van with the eccentric criterion that both vehicles be driven by the most panicky man in the Midlands was surely vanishingly small.

“That doesn’t explain why you put mine on there too, Arthur,” he said, and admired himself for how patiently he’d managed to say it.

“Well, your picture is next to Martin’s picture, and then underneath there’s your name next to Martin’s name and under those are the little descriptions Mum and me wrote of you, and then I put Skip’s number at the bottom. But, it looks all wonky with just his, so I put yours next to it to balance it out.” Arthur looked over at him a little worriedly. “Why? Have lots of people been phoning you up?”

“My daughter rang me.” It was out of Douglas’s mouth before he could stop it. There was something about the configuration of a flight deck, Douglas thought – the seclusion, the quiet, the two lone seats facing forward and nothing to look at in front but miles and miles of sky – that made it remarkably hard to keep one’s secrets to oneself. If Douglas were Catholic he’d call it confessional.

“Ooh great, how is she?” Arthur’s grin morphed almost instantly into confusion. “Wait a minute, doesn’t she have your number already, Douglas?”

“Not Millie,” Douglas said. “My elder daughter. Verity.”

“You have two daughters?” Arthur looked thrilled at this revelation, which was unsurprising given how well he and Millie got on. “Brilliant! Are we going to get to meet her?”

“I think it’s best if I meet her by myself before subjecting her to the acquired taste that is MJN, don’t you think?”

“What’s an acquired taste?”

“The company of four people who choose, of their own free will, to spend nearly all of their waking hours shut in a metal box together thousands of feet above the ground with only word games, teasing and cheese for entertainment is an example of one.”

“Oh right, yeah. Probably best you give her some warning.” Arthur looked over at Douglas with an unusually perceptive expression. “You haven’t been able to see her in a while, have you?”

“No, Arthur,” Douglas said quietly.

“Because you and her mum got divorced?”

Douglas heaved a sigh. Trust Arthur not to beat about the bush.

“Not really. Her mum and I split up when she was nine. Getting on for twenty years ago, in fact. And we saw each other a bit, but then I remarried and had Millie and moved house and started here at MJN…” he tailed off, hoping Arthur would get the picture.

“And you stopped drinking!” Arthur said brightly, and Douglas wished he wasn’t flying an aeroplane so that he could safely put his head in his hands. “That was then, wasn’t it? Just before you joined us.”

“Yes, Arthur,” Douglas said, not bothering to mask the layers of bitterness and regret in his tone that came with the reminder. It was only the two of them in the flight deck, after all. And Arthur would probably forget this conversation as soon as they got off the plane. Or as soon as Douglas asked him for another cup of tea. Or if he saw an interestingly-shaped cloud.

“Right-o,” Arthur said, as though that made everything make sense.

Which, Douglas thought, it did.


End file.
